What is polychord?

A musical instrument and a song writing tool, polychord is a fun way to explore music on your iPad. While bands have already discovered that polychord makes a great addition to any studio, it's also suited to those who have little or no experience making music. If you're a filmmaker or video game designer, now you can compose your own beautiful music. And it's a great way for kids to build song-writing confidence, even if they lack the dexterity and coordination of seasoned pros. And speaking of professionals: although polychord is easy to use, there are a ton of powerful features underneath the clean and simple UI.

Chords made easy

Polychord gives you instant access to a lot chords. By wrapping the different types of chords around each circle, we were able to fit a lot into a small space, while keeping them big enough to press easily. This gives you easy access to over 60 chords at any time!

Auto Accompany

Turn on Auto Accompany, press any chord, and the drums and bass will play along in tune --there's also an arpeggiator which dynamically plays the notes of the selected chord. Switch to a different chord and they'll follow you. Beginners can button-mash their way to a song, while more seasoned song-writing pros will find that polychord is a great way to break out of a rut.

Picking & Strumming

This is what truly sets polychord apart. Have you tried to play a piano keyboard on a small touchscreen? It's not ideal. Polychord's strum keys change automatically with the chords, so it doesn't have to make room for keys you don't need. They're incredibly fast and responsive, so you can slide up and down the keys with many fingers at one time.

Full tech-specs

Audio

Warm Vintage Sounds

Choose from a selection of classic synthesizer wave shapes that were modeled after real analogue waves -- they're organic.

4 proprietary synthesizers

warm & fat waves: sine,sawtooth,triangle,square

Cutoff filter with resonance

30 note polyphony for chords & strum keys

full ADSR envelope controls

bitshift mode for 8 bit chiptunes-style sounds

tremolo with speed & Depth control

sample accurate timing

Sharing & Recording

Share with SoundCloud

We worked with the folks over at SoundCloud to make it easy to share & upload directly from polychord -- you can even post to your twitter and facebook accounts once they're synched up.

Total integration with SoundCloud network, including Facebook and Twitter extensions

Lightweight performance recording files let you record thousands of takes

See the keys light up when playing back a song

File manager for renaming,tagging and deleting songs

Palettes

Save your palettes (entire state of the instrument)

Assign palettes to f-keys for fast switching during performances

MIDI

Use polychord as a controller for Digital Audio Workstations like Ableton, Garageband, Logic & Pro Tools

Control other compatible apps on the same iPad using virtual MIDI ports (both Beta apps in the video below are now available):

Skins

Polychord and the Polychord logo are trademarks of Shoulda Woulda Coulda Inc., registered in the U.S. Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc.